I have an application in the form of a jar file which is around 2MB in size. For several reasons, I have to bundle the JRE with my application. When I create an MSI with my jar and the JRE, the MSI size comes out to be around 30MB.
I am looking for a commercial or free JRE which I can bundle so that I can reduce the size of my MSI to as low as possible. I am looking at 5MB total, but even upto 10MB may be OK.
Prebuilt JRE Binaries would be great, but not an absolute must.
I looked at similar questions posted here and here.
A lot of answers in these and other threads suggest Excelsior. I downloaded an evaluation version of Excelsior JET & Tried it out - for a few reasons, I think it may not be the right product for me.
1) Excelsior looks at reducing the footprint of the Installed Product not the Installer. I don't care much about the size of the Installed Product - I am mainly looking at a smaller download (the installer of my product currently at 30MB).
2) Amongst other things, Excelsior does lot of optimizations to code to achieve this - I don't want my jar file touched at all. I want a smaller JRE with my jar as is. There isn't a way to turn off some of the optimisations also.
3) Excelsior creates an EXE - I am not particularly looking for this - I am ok with my product being invoked via the javaw.exe command line.
So are there any suggestions for my need?
Avian and ProGuard are your friends as someone has already mentioned in one of the threads you linked to (it's the second comment btw).
From the Avian homepage:
The class library is designed to be as loosely coupled as possible,
allowing tools like ProGuard to aggressively isolate the minimum code
needed for an application. This translates to smaller downloads and
faster startup.
Sounds like exactly what you need. And if that doesn't help you then look at the rest of the tools referenced in that thread.
There is a possible solution here. Those tools install a minimalistic version of Java. I don't know if it is small enough for you. Just take a look and see:
https://superuser.com/questions/745112/how-do-i-run-a-jar-file-without-installing-java
I would make the JRE a separate install from Oracle (or your preferred vendor) You could have it download as required if you wish. If the JRE is already installed, it would be a waste to download it again even a reduced JRE.
BTW: I wouldn't mess with what is in the JRE because
AFAIK its a violation of your license agreement.
Its very difficult to get right and not remove a class you might need one day.
Maybe outdated: there was a rumor about something called JavaKernel/ConsumerJRE.
http://weblogs.java.net/blog/enicholas/archive/2007/05/java_kernel_unm.html
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/kernel-135055.html
Related
Putting development tools (compilers, IDEs, editors, ...) and runtime environments (jre, .net framework, interpreters, ...) under the version control has a couple of nice reasons. First, you can easily compile/run your program just by checking out your repository. You don't have to have anything else. Second, the triple is surely version compatible as you once tested it. However, it has its own drawbacks. The main one is the big volume of large binary files that must be put under version control system. That may cause the VCS slower and the backup process harder. What's your idea?
Tools and dependencies actually used to compile and build the project, absolutely - it is very useful if you ever have to debug an issue or develop a fix for an older version and you've moved on to newer versions that aren't quite compatible with the old ones.
IDE's & editors no - ideally you're project should be buildable from a script so these would not be necessary. The generated output should still be the same regardless of what you used to edit the source.
I include a text (and thus easily diff-able) file in every project root called "How-to-get-this-project-running" that includes any and all things necessary, including the correct .net version and service packs.
Also for proprietry IDE's (e.g. Visual Studio), there can be licensing issues as this makes it difficult to manage who is using which pieces of software.
Edit:
We also used to store batch files that automatically checked out the source code automatically (and all dependencies) in source control. Developers just check out the "Setup" folder and run the batch scripts, instead of having to search the repository for appropriate bits and pieces.
What I find is very nice and common (in .Net projects I have experience with anyway) is including any "non-default install" dependencies in a lib or dependencies folder with source control. The runtime is provided by the GAC and kind of assumed.
First, you can easily compile/run your program just by checking out your repository.
Not true: it often isn't enough to just get/copy/check out a tool, instead the tool must also be installed on the workstation.
Personally I've seen libraries and 3rd-party components in the source version control system, but not the tools.
I keep all dependencies in a folder under source control named "3rdParty". I agree that this is very convinient and you can just pull down the source and get going. This really shouldnt affect the performance of the source control.
The only real draw back is that the initial size to pull down can be fairly large. In my situation anyone who pulls downt he code usually will run it also, so it is ok. But if you expect many people to pull down the source just to read then this can be annoying.
I've seen this done in more than one place where I worked. In all cases, I've found it to be pretty convenient.
I want to use Selection Service feature from the eclipse RCP in my swing project. Currently the o.e.ui.workbench bundle which contains the related interface is around 3.7 MB, that's way too huge for our requirement
Is there any way to split it the workbench to get only the selection service
Are there distros already for this
Is it leagal to do so. Are there any licencse issues?
It does not look like it would be that hard to do it yourself, and that's pretty much what you would have to do. I know of no distros that do this however.
It's certainly legal to do so; you can freely use or modify any part of Eclipse until the EPL. If you split it without modifications then you have no obligations under the license. However if you extend it (and redistribute your code), then you need to make available your code that extends it (which can be done using an Eclipse bug report for example).
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I've met quite a few people lately who says that 3rd party libraries doesn't belong in version control. These people haven't been able to explain to me why they shouldn't yet, so I hoped you guys could come to my rescue :)
Personally, I think that when I check the trunk of a project out, it should just work - No need to go to other sites to find libraries. More often than not, you'd end up with multiple versions of the same 3rd party lib for different developers then - and sometimes with incompatibility problems.
Is it so bad to have a libs folder up there, with "guarenteed-to-work" libraries you could reference?
In SVN, there is a pattern used to store third-party libraries called vendor branches. This same idea would work for any other SVN-like version control system. The basic idea is that you include the third-party source in its own branch and then copy that branch into your main tree so that you can easily apply new versions over your local customizations. It also cleanly keeps things separate. IMHO, it's wrong to directly include the third-party stuff in your tree, but a vendor branch strikes a nice balance.
Another reason to check in libraries to your source control which I haven't seen mentioned here is that it gives you the ability to rebuild your application from a specific snapshot or version. This allows you to recreate the exact version that someone may report a bug on. If you can't rebuild the exact version you risk not being able to reproduce/debug problems.
Yes you should (when feasible).
You should be able to take a fresh machine and build your project with as few steps as possible. For me, it's:
Install IDE (e.g. Visual Studio)
Install VCS (e.g. SVN)
Checkout
Build
Anything more has to have very good justification.
Here's an example: I have a project that uses Yahoo's YUI compressor to minify JS and CSS. The YUI .jar files go in source control into a tools directory alongside the project. The Java runtime however, does not--that has become a prereq for the project much like the IDE. Considering how popular JRE is, it seems like a reasonable requirement.
No - I don't think you should put third party libraries into source control. The clue is in the name 'source control'.
Although source control can be used for distribution and deployment, that is not its prime function. And the arguments that you should just be able to check out your project and have it work are not realistic. There are always dependencies. In a web project, they might be Apache, MySQL, the programming runtime itself, say Python 2.6. You wouldn't pile all those into your code repository.
Extra code libraries are just the same. Rather than include them in source control for easy of deployment, create a deployment/distribution mechanism that allows all dependencies to easily be obtained and installed. This makes the steps for checking out and running your software something like:
Install VCS
Sync code
Run setup script (which downloads and installs the correct version of all dependencies)
To give a specific example (and I realise this is quite web centric), a Python web application might contain a requirements.txt file which reads:
simplejson==1.2
django==1.0
otherlibrary==0.9
Run that through pip and the job is done. Then when you want to upgrade to use Django 1.1 you simply change the version number in your requirements file and re-run the setup.
The source of 3rd party software doesn't belong (except maybe as static reference), but the compiled binary do.
If your build process will compile an assembly/dll/jar/module, then only keep the 3rd party source code in source control.
If you won't compile it, then put the binary assembly/dll/jar/module into source control.
This could depend on the language and/or environment you have, but for projects I work on I place no libraries (jar files) in source control. It helps to be using a tool such as Maven which fetches the necessary libraries for you. (Each project maintains a list of required jars, Maven automatically fetches them from a common repository - http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/)
That being said, if you're not using Maven or some other means of managing and automatically fetching the necessary libraries, by all means check them into your version control system. When in doubt, be practical about it.
The way I've tended to handle this in the past is to take a pre-compiled version of 3rd party libraries and check that in to version control, along with header files. Instead of checking the source code itself into version control, we archive it off into a defined location (server hard drive).
This kind of gives you the best of both worlds: a 1 step fetch process that fetches everything you need, but it doesn't bog down your version control system with a bunch of necessary files. Also, by fetching pre-compiled binaries, you can skip that phase of compilation, which makes your builds faster.
You should definitively put 3rd party libraries under the source control. Also, you should try to avoid relying on stuff installed on individual developer's machine. Here's why:
All developers will then share the same version of the component. This is very important.
Your build environment will become much more portable. Just install source control client on a fresh machine, download your repository, build and that's it (in theory, at least :) ).
Sometimes it is difficult to obtain an old version of some library. Keeping them under your source control makes sure you won't have such problems.
However, you don't need to add 3rd party source code in your repository if you don't plan to change the code. I tend just to add binaries, but I make sure only these libraries are referenced in our code (and not the ones from Windows GAC, for example).
We do because we want to have tested an updated version of the vendor branch before we integrate it with our code. We commit changes to this when testing new versions. We have the philosophy that everything you need to run the application should be in SVN so that
You can get new developers up and running
Everyone uses the same versions of various libraries
We can know exactly what code was current at a given point in time, including third party libraries.
No, it isn't a war crime to have third-party code in your repository, but I find that to upset my sense of aesthetics. Many people here seem to be of the opinion that it's good to have your whole developement team on the same version of these dependencies; I say it is a liability. You end up dependent on a specific version of that dependency, where it is a lot harder to use a different version later. I prefer a heterogenous development environment - it forces you to decouple your code from the specific versions of dependencies.
IMHO the right place to keep the dependencies is on your tape backups, and in your escrow deposit, if you have one. If your specific project requires it (and projects are not all the same in this respect), then also keep a document under your version control system that links to these specific versions.
I like to check 3rd party binaries into a "lib" directory that contains any external dependencies. After all, you want to keep track of specific versions of those libraries right?
When I compile the binaries myself, I often check in a zipped up copy of the code along side the binaries. That makes it clear that the code is not there for compiling, manipulating, etc. I almost never need to go back and reference the zipped code, but a couple times it has been helpful.
If I can get away with it, I keep them out of my version control and out of my file system. The best case of this is jQuery where I'll use Google's AJAX Library and load it from there:
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
My next choice would be to use something like Git Submodules. And if neither of those suffice, they'll end up in version control, but at that point, its only as up to date as you are...
I have an third-party applet that requires JRE v1.5_12 to work correctly. THe user is installing JRE v1.6.07 or better. It used to be with 1.5 and below, that I could have multiple JRE's on the machine and specify which one to use - but with 1.6 that apepars to be broken. How do I tell the browser I want to use v1.5_12 instead of the latest one installed?
For security reasons, you can no longer force it to use older JRE's. Say release 12 has a huge security hole, and everyone installs release 13 to patch it. Evil java applets could just say "run with release 12 please" and then carry out their exploits, rendering the patches useless.
Most likely you have some code with security holes that the newer JRE is blocking, because it would cause a security risk. Fix your code, should be pretty minor changes, then you wont have to worry.
See this page for more info on the change.
The new applet engine (that will be shipped with 1.6u10 when Sun gets around to officially shipping it) gives you a tremendous amount of control in this area. It's going to take awhile to get enough systems on 6u10 to where you can actually rely on the functionality (unless you are corporate) - but it is coming (seems like it's about 5 years too late).
Here's a JavaWorld article describing this at a very high level: article text
6u10 also has a deployment toolkit that provides super easy to use javascript snippets that you can include in your applet deployment pages. These snippets handle JRE version checking, user notification, JRE downloading on demand, and a number of other things that are otherwise a hassle (not impossible, just a pain). The deployment kit has been designed to fail gracefully, so it does amazing things if 6u10 or above is installed, and drops back to decent behavior for older JREs.
One really, really nice thing about the new applet engine is that it runs in a separate process space from the browser. This has a couple of very big advantages, including the ability to have multiple applets running in different versions of the JRE (yes, you can specify different required JREs, including restrictions on how old and how new of JRE you support - the applet engine will re-use JREs if it can, but it has the ability to start up a different one if it needs).
Simple usecase: assemble an Eclipse product using simple scripts, just dumping bundles into the plugins dir.
This used to work with 3.3 - with 3.5 it's broken: my application doesn't start as the app plugin is not found.
Question: what's the easiest way to fix that? This seems to be the only pain in the whole upgrade process for me.
Attempts:
I guess this is a no-no for P2: it maintains the bundles.info file instead, which is probably very smart.. a bit too smart for me.
Some ideas I had:
can I just skip P2 altogether and get back to plain old, simple -dirty- discovery mechanism?
can I set up plugins dir as a 'watched directory'
looks like I need to use the p2.reconciler for that.. oh wait, it's deprecated already :-( bug 251561.. (thanks VonC for the pointer)
can this old setting in the config.ini still work? (which is now replaced with the 'simpleconfigurator') osgi.bundles=org.eclipse.equinox.common#2:start, org.eclipse.update.configurator#3:start, org.eclipse.core.runtime#start
should I call the (p2) director?
"please pick my plugins up" :)
I'd avoid the dropin folder for this - that's more for the
end-users.
I'd avoid messing with the bundles.info if possible.
I don't care about all those smart features in my product yet- actually the users don't use the built-in update mechanism at all.
So I'd like to KISS (ie: just to start up), and add more advanced support when needed.
I've asked this on Eclipse forums, but no answer yet, so would really be grateful for some enlightenment.
Also, feel free to correct me on the assumptions - I've just read the P2 docs, which seem confusing at times.
Thanks!
Answer: actually option 3 above seems to work after all - thanks Francis for confirming this! (it didn't work originally, but that was probably caused by some missing deps).
My only issue with that now is, some Eclipse bundles actually require simpleconfigurator. So I wonder if swapping it out will cause problems down the line.
You can alter your configuration/config.ini file to not use the org.eclipse.equinox.simpleconfigurator (which does the p2-based configuration) and instead use the org.eclipse.update.configurator which is the old-school way of just configuring whatever is in the plugins directory. This should give you what you want.
Even if it does not fully answer what you are after, you can specify in an eclipse.ini (like the one I describe here):
-Dorg.eclipse.equinox.p2.reconciler.dropins.directory=C:/jv/eclipse/mydropins
That does specify to p2 to monitor any directory of your choosing to detect plugins in it.
Another source of idea could be this article: Composing and updating custom Eclipse distros
It's not hard to create a feature based product that includes these things, and do a product build to end up with something like this:
Note: the concept of reconciliation is detailed in the eclipse Wiki.
For certain installations of Eclipse, there will exist the notion of a shared installation -- this may be in the case of a Linux system where a base set of software is installed via packages (perhaps RPMs), or may be in a Maya deployment where shared profiles are defined in a central server.
In both cases, it is necessary to perform reconciliation between the shared profile and the user's current instantiation of the profile including any modifications they may have made.
Part of this mechanism is the Dropins Reconciler setting. Although, as bug 251561 illustrates, it is not advised to put too many plugins in there.
Maybe this will help you (shot in the dark)? I found this when upgrading my Eclipse installation to Galileo and trying to keep my Flex Plugin install.